Palmer, S, McMillan, M and Morlighem, M (2015) Subglacial lake drainage detected beneath the Greenland ice sheet. Nature Communications, 6. 8408. ISSN 2041-1723
Abstract
The contribution of the Greenland ice sheet to sea-level rise has accelerated in recent decades. Subglacial lake drainage events can induce an ice sheet dynamic response—a process that has been observed in Antarctica, but not yet in Greenland, where the presence of subglacial lakes has only recently been discovered. Here we investigate the water flow paths from a subglacial lake, which drained beneath the Greenland ice sheet in 2011. Our observations suggest that the lake was fed by surface meltwater flowing down a nearby moulin, and that the draining water reached the ice margin via a subglacial tunnel. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar-derived measurements of ice surface motion acquired in 1995 suggest that a similar event may have occurred 16 years earlier, and we propose that, as the climate warms, increasing volumes of surface meltwater routed to the bed will cause such events to become more common in the future.
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Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | (c) 2015 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Institute for Applied Geosciences (IAG) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 19 Oct 2015 14:02 |
Last Modified: | 12 Feb 2019 13:55 |
Published Version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms9408 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Nature Publishing Group |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/ncomms9408 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:90943 |
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